Written and Directed by Shane Black
Starring Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe and Angourie Rice
Age between romantic leads: No real romantic leads, which is a bonus in and of itself, but Gosling tries to crack onto one woman who is a mere 2 years younger than he. Bingo bango bongo.
There’s a lot of similarities between this film and the 2014 PT Anderson film Inherent Vice. Both are 70s set mystery films, following a private investigator who isn’t the best in the world. I got hopelessly lost in both, forgetting why this person was important, or why they were tracking that person. The difference is, while Inherent Vice suffers hugely from the lack of clarity, presenting you with a fog of half information, The Nice Guys keeps the action fast, the dialogue snappy and the entertainment high. A better if not perfrect comparison would the The Big Lebowski.
If you’ve seen writer/director Shane Black’s first film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and to a lesser extent Iron Man 3, you’ll know he is a big fan of quippy dialogue, tiny, human moments in the midst of action set pieces, and generally poking fun at the tropes and conventions of the action genre (something he got to know very well as the chief writer of the Lethal Weapon series). This film gives you more of the same, which sounds like he’s being lazy and sticking to formula, but when you consider how many films go for a fun tone and miss horribly, it’s obviously a much trickier task to pull off than it would seem.
The performances are tremendous, without a noticeable weak link in the cast. The chemistry between Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling fizzes throughout, providing many of the film’s biggest laughs, but the standout performer is Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling’s daughter. Any young actor has an uphill battle with me, based on my strong disliking of any child of under 18 year old with confidence. It’s the first thing I’ve ever seen Ms Rice in, and she was strong, feisty and confident, without any of the Shirley Temple-ish freaky confident child vibes I often get. In providing the moral compass of the film, she allowed Shane Black to wring more disfunction from his leads, so unburdened were they from doing the right thing, which was a nice choice.
I was initially going to give this a 4 thing review. But then I remembered a recent conversation I had with my wife, who questioned with a previous film what was missing, what would have pushed it from a 4 thing into a 5. And I couldn’t answer. And it's the same with this. Great script, great performances, lovely period details, interesting settings, a mystery unfolding over time, bit of action, cool soundtrack. Sure, it’s not going to realign your perception of self, but by penalizing a film for not being ‘deep’, I’m buying into the award show mentality of a film being inherently less valuable if it makes you laugh. And I do not agree with that at all. Which means I have to rate this...